The Evening Star Read Free

other customers of the Pig Stand, a typical assortment of human flotsam and jetsam, most of them possessed of a fatigue not yet quite emptied of curiosity, merely wondered why Aurora, a woman who looked like she had enough money to eat elsewhere, kept showing up at the Pig Stand in the company of a frizzy-haired little old lady who, in their acute estimation, was some kind of Louisiana cracker.
    Like many residents of the north side of Houston, most of the Pig Standers tended to take life steady and take it slow. A few chubby Don Juans in Hawaiian shirts mustered snap enough to flirt with Marge or one of the other waitresses, and a few truckers or delivery men, all too well aware that time is money, strode in, ate a cheeseburger or a few eggs, and strode out. But the majority of the customers were in no hurry; from long experience they had learned that the best way to handle the Houston humidity was to ease through it slowly, one step or one thought at a time.
    Aurora was not quite ready to let go of her anger at the treacherous Julie. To her annoyance, Tommy himself had no interest in her anger, and would not react at all when Julie was mentioned.
    “Julie was a little squirrely,” he had said, and that was all he said.
    “There are often problems in military families,” Aurora remarked. She finished her pie and took out her mirror, butshe could not muster enough interest in her appearance to do anything about it. What was there would have to do—perhaps forever, but at least until they got home.
    “The General’s from a military family,” Rosie reminded her. “He’s as much trouble as five or six military families, but I doubt he’s lost a wink of sleep in his life.”
    “You’re quite wrong,” Aurora said. “I’ve caused him to lose thousands of winks of sleep. One of the few powers I can still claim is the ability to upset Hector sufficiently to keep him awake until I’m ready for him to start snoring.”
    General Hector Scott, Aurora’s resident lover—a category not to be confused with that of the several nonresident aspirants—was eighty-six, and not happy about it; he was even less happy about the fact that only three weeks before, he had managed, in defiance of all the known laws of physics, to turn a golf cart over on himself, breaking both legs and one hip. He was recuperating, at a pace much too slow to suit him, on the glassed-in patio next to Aurora’s bedroom, on the second floor of her house.
    The fact that he was in de facto confinement on the second floor was another thing General Scott was not happy about. Aurora had had him carried upstairs over his stern, almost violent, protests. The boys who brought him home in the ambulance, perhaps unaware that he had been a four-star general, took their orders from Aurora and ignored the thumps he attempted to give them.
    General Scott at once concluded that Aurora could have had only one motive for consigning him to the second floor: she intended to make free with her other suitors on the first floor, where he could neither see, hear, nor interfere with anything she might decide to do.
    The most threatening of the other suitors was a little Frenchman named Pascal, an attaché at the French consulate. The General couldn’t stand Pascal, and didn’t conceal the fact—indeed, General Scott concealed few facts, and in the past few months had even ceased to conceal certain parts of his own anatomy that both Aurora and Rosie would have preferred that he conceal.
    This new propensity of the General’s was on both women’sminds as they left the Pig Stand and prodded the old Cadillac along its homeward path, toward the well-tamed forests of River Oaks.
    “Has he flashed lately?” Aurora asked. “Sinner that I am, I hardly thought that I could have committed enough sins to earn me a grandson in jail and a flasher on my patio.”
    “Yep, he flashed this morning,” Rosie said. “Then he had the gall to complain about his eggs.”
    “How, exactly,